The Maze…
Well I guess put this at the same level as 25-26, but with a bigger and more frustrating twist ? Lol… However, it was not frustrating this time, it was just… confusing?
Well, it was an actual maze, no maps, no direction to go, no change the scale of your screen to get a pager or whatever, no…
It felt very confusing because again, I have never seen or dealt with anything like this before, at least I don’t think so…
So what was the goal?
Well, just like each level, the goal is to get to the flag and get the password, but this was a little different. I mean it did say time to escape, so I was thinking: “Well, this is a prison.” So the mindset was, I will try to figure out what language this program speaks and understand, and maybe we can go from there. Initially, because everything I will type would just come back in uppercase and nothing else but a denied permission, I thought: “Oh, maybe it is just switching whatever I type to a different case. Therefore, I tried typing in uppercase, but well, nothing happened.
So I thought, nothing is happening, with letters, numbers… But hummm, let’s try symbols? And this is where I started learning deep about wild cards or globbing characters.
Well, I knew a little bit about (*), matching pretty much everything if no precision is given. But the one I actually learned the most about is (?). What an interesting, cool and important wildcard.
Well, since you asked, how does (?) work?
(): Matches everything
(?): Matches the number of characters.
Let me give you an example: say you have created a folder named: thisfolder, and inside you have the files: this.file, tha.tfile, the.files.
As you can see, “thisfolder” has 3 different files that all have 9 characters.
So how do you get to them? The folder has 10 characters, so you get to it like this: /?????????
Assuming that the folder is inside root / folder. Now if you press enter, well it will tell you where you are. You have found the folder. Now you wanna see what is inside the folder… If there are not 300 executable files, you can do /??????????/: This will run or show everything that resides inside that folder.
Now that you see what is inside, let’s say you wanna open one of them, well you know all you got to do is match the characters. Well , /?10/?*9, this will give you the same results as /?*10/ because it would still match everything in your folder since they all have 9 characters. But then you can look at the difference, anything that jumps up about the folder. Inside this folder, all the files have (.) in different places in their name.
So the solution is to match the same exact path and character placement as the one that you are trying to explore. And that is how I escaped. I matched the path to /vim.basic, opened it then opened a terminal.
I was also wondering if there was a different way of escaping, so I will check other people's answers as well . But, GG baby, we are done.
"Whhhaaatttt… Others, just did $0… Lol, I like my method better though, but damn lol"
Yeah this was a genuine reaction because I did spend hours trying to escape that maze, so I was just like: "Eh... I did it best"
It was the pain talking, hahaha...
I think that was a clever way to solve that problem and that would have saved me a lot of time but I was probably not going to learn much.
Question though, what is $0? And how does it work?
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